Comments by Elliot Forbes ’40
The completion of Sanders Theatre afforded a welcome expansion of concert space. Although the theatre had not been designed for music making, at the 1876 Commencement, the acoustics were judged well suited. And so, a concert was planned. A logical choice was the Theodore Thomas Orchestra. In the seventies its tours exerted telling influences. The first subscription concert at Sanders occurred on November 21, starting with Beethoven’s Conservation of the House Overture and ending with his Symphony No. 7. The program marked the premiere of Overture to As You Like It by John Knowles Paine, Harvard’s first professor of music.
An illustrious event cemented the Music Department’s name with Sanders Theatre. In the Fall of 1880 a group of students decided to emulate Oxford by producing a Greek Play in the original language. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus was chosen and Paine was asked to provide incidental music. In May 1881 four performances were given. John Sullivan Dwight recorded in his Journal: “We really do not think it rash to express our feeling that in it we have witnessed the most complete and thoroughly artistic presentation of a work of pure, high Art, that this part of the world has ever yet achieved out of its own resources.” He cited the beauty of the theatre and the appropriateness of its “memorial hall of tablets.” For orchestra and seventy-five voices, John Knowles Paine, composed an overture, six choruses and a postlude, “every number of which was received with enthusiasm.” The audience included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Eliot Norton, and Alexander Agassiz.
For the season 1879-80, Paine organized a series of classical concerts. With the formation of the Boston Symphony orchestra in 1881, its founder, Henry Lee Higginson ’63, saw to it that the new orchestra would continue the Harvard tradition by endowing six annual concerts in Cambridge (later expanded to ten).
Due to the size of the stage and to the unheated hallway which the players had to cross to reach the stage, this tradition was broken in the 1960s when the orchestra, under Erich Leinsdorf, found a loop-hole in Major Higginson’s provision and withdrew to establish the “Cambridge Series” at Symphony Hall.
With the development of student performing groups, both choral and instrumental after the First World War, the undergraduates made increasing use of the Theatre for concerts. And when Alumni Hall no longer served as a dining space, it became, perhaps, America’s largest “green room.”
In 1939, there was one particularly noteworthy production, sponsored by the Harvard Student Union, the presentation of Marc Blitzstein’s “opera” The Cradle Will Rock under the direction of Leonard Bernstein ’39 and Arthur Szathmary 2G. With subdued lighting and the guiding force of Bernstein, playing from memory at an upright piano on stage, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, the whole score was brought to life.
Elliot Forbes ’40, A.M. ’47 was Fanny Peabody Professor of Music, Emeritus and the author of the book The History of Music at Harvard.